The Public Burning is a groundbreaking novel that emerged as a controversial best-seller in 1977. It has since become one of the most influential novels of our time. This work of contemporary fiction is unique as it uses living historical figures as characters.

The novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The story is dominantly narrated by Vice-President Richard Nixon — the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime.

The novel features an enormous cast including Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate.

All these characters, along with thousands more, converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. Not a single person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless public spectacle.

In a rolling sea off the coast of South America, a target disappears in a puff of green light. In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night. To the two greatest nations on earth, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first Star Wars missile defense system.

No one knows this more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviets' capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army's new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair.

Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first — and that's when all hell breaks loose. Because Filitov, code-named Cardinal, is America's highest agent in the Kremlin, and he is about to be betrayed to the KGB. His rescue could spell the difference between peace and war, and it is up to Jack Ryan to accomplish it — if he can.

In a breathtaking sequence of hunter and hunted, Filitov's life, and Ryan's, and that of the world itself, literally hang in the balance.